Gutenberg's Apprentice (21 page)

CHAPTER 7

IMPRESSORIUM

        
Tuesday after Saint Augustine (30 August 1452)

T
HE DAYS of the saints are lettered in red. It has always seemed to Peter Schoeffer that this day should be remembered the same way.

The morning they began the printing on the Bible, the crew came round the press in the cool darkness before dawn. The master stood before that oaken frame, his hair pulled back, his eyes uplifted as if at an altar. “May God Almighty bless this work,” he boomed and raised his arm.

Peter held his breath through that first pull, ears waiting for the telltale metal bite, the little grunt that Ruppel always made at the last tug. Then everyone stepped back as Keffer hauled the whole works out and peeled the printed sheet away. Gutenberg and Fust each took a corner of the sheet and bent their heads, one dark, one fair, and surveyed it closely. Peter never would forget the look of triumph they exchanged.

“Fiat imprimere!” his father cried this time.

The crew all hooted. The press began to crash as the two pressmen found a rhythm. The others should have gone back to their stools in the composing room, but none of them could tear themselves away.

Peter fell in love with the whole motion: of the great sheet lifting and then settling; the hard and painful kiss; the sweet, slight sucking sound of linen peeling from the metal. The master’s ink was as black as the night before Creation, blacker than the oak gall ever was. Peter held it to his eyes and marveled. Never had lines ended in such symmetry; never had the world seen such a thing.

The city just outside their door receded utterly. They were aware only of the chain of being, one man handing the sheet on to the next: the boy who reached it to the inker to the pressman who returned the printed sheet back to the master, his beard tucked into his shirt. Like a living creature they were now, a new and many-headed thing.

And then the glow wore off, as it must always. Yet even at the time Peter knew those days were incandescent, without rival. There was a bursting in him—a heady sense of strength, that wondrous feeling of pure rightness that does shine in every life for some brief time.

It fell to Peter to set the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch of Moses. Hans didn’t care which lines he set, so long as he could do them sitting down. His back had started aching.

“How old are you, then?” Peter asked. Hans scratched his pate and reckoned. “Fifty, maybe,” he said, shrugging. “Sigismund was on the throne.”

They’d work in parallel, the master said: Peter would start on Genesis, Hans on the book of Judges. The text they took from pages torn from that small scribal Paris Bible. The man who’d written it used every trick to shorten the words so he could cram in more. It strained Peter’s mind sometimes to grasp which word was meant by which abbreviation—and he’d been trained. For Hans it was a horror, plainly. “Ex-audio, ex-animo, ex-bloody amino,” he’d mutter, lips protruding with the effort. Peter felt for his old friend. But how to help him, without seeming that he flaunted his own skill? He started turning now and then to him, and asking what he thought some word might be. Hans would grunt, and spit into the can he kept below his feet for just that purpose. How in the devil should he know, if it was gibberish to fancy hands? So Peter wrote a list out of the words that were most common, and their usual abbreviations, made a show of looking at it, asking Hans to scan his lines. Thus did they find a way to choose, together, phrasings of felicity, and lines neither too loose nor tight.

They set it
seriatum
, page by page. Peter had never read the scriptures in this way, from first word of each chapter to the last,
historia
unspooling in his hands. He was amazed that he should be the one to put these words on this skin and paper. They shaped it physically, he and Gutenberg and Hans: they made the Word incarnate. Peter would pause sometimes and gaze on his wizened friend as they sat hunched above their letter cases, and ask the Lord how such a task had fallen to such two unlikely men.

If copying a manuscript was prayer, then this was shouting out the psalms from every rooftop. It grew in him with every passing day, this feeling of abashedness and wonder.
Why hast Thou, Lord, put such a gift in these poor hands?

It could not be for beauty’s sake alone, or even just to multiply His teachings. It seemed to Peter that God had sent His Word, as He’d once sent His son, to cleanse their corrupt and misguided world. Was this not the clear message of the Gospel according to John?
In principio erat verbum
: in the beginning was the Word—a Word they flung out now, a boundless net of shining letters, cast out by that great fisher among men.

And when he asked just why this miracle had come to Mainz, the answer came back just as clearly. This gift had been bestowed upon the city of Saint Martin, who tore his cloak in two to clothe a beggar. It was intended, then, for all mankind: the humble just as surely as the rich.

The testaments, of course, are full of trials. From the moment in the Garden that temptation raised its serpent’s head, God set his creature tests to prove his faith. So was it too inside the Humbrechthof as soon as they embarked. Within a week, the problems started.

The sheets were so large and unwieldy that they flapped and slipped. They’d miss a pin, and lodge lopsided when the frame was lowered on the
forme
. Ruppel, sweating, nearly lost his hand the first time he tried to straighten one that went half-cocked, only springing back just in time. Gutenberg stood over him, haranguing, cursing at each wasted sheet, threatening to dock his pay. He scooped up the wasted sheets, counting and recounting them, his face a frightful sight. A half a dozen, creeping Christ, a bloody fortune. He was seething as he called a halt. “Nail half a dozen extra pins on to that blasted cross.” Ruppel obliged, and the paper slipped much less, although the printing went more slowly for it. Each night the master gathered up those sheets that had been fouled and sourly counted them before he locked them up. Thank God the ones they lost were mostly paper, and not hide; the first time that the pressman and his beater lost a sheet of vellum, the master came up and tore it out of Keffer’s grip and rolled it in a bat that he used to whack him. Then it was laid to rest like a dead thing inside the crate of wasted sheets.

Nor did his glossy, sticky ink hold its shape in that furnace of late summer. With each advancing hour it melted to a slop that either beaded on the letters or just dribbled down their sides. Though Gutenberg reduced the oil and sent for drying agents, still it slopped. So then they’d have to work by cool of night, he said, and cursed the cost of extra candles.

And even so the pages dried and shrank before they had a chance to print the other side; they’d have to dampen the sheets again, but gingerly, and pray they held their shape. Of course the printed sheets could not be laid atop each other, out of fear of the ink smearing. Peter still remembers how young Wiegand staggered, arms held stiffly out, toes seeking out the ladder to the drying line. The drying pages hung above their heads, and swayed and rustled when the master thundered past: a flock of great white gulls that hectored them from overhead, with sharp, black markings on their sides.

Gutenberg was a blur in constant motion, darting back and forth from forge to press, back to the master book upon his desk, prodding, poking, pulling at his lips and beard. He was the only one who moved; the rest of them were chained to their respective stations. Fust appeared each evening as the crew began their nightly shift, but Master Gutenberg was always there: he never seemed to leave, even to eat or sleep. There was no moment—waking, sleeping, upstairs, down—when they were free of him, his beady eyes, his dark, oppressive presence.

And even so, the thing just crawled. A week passed, then ten days, and all they’d managed to produce was the first three pages of Saint Jerome’s prologue. They’d had to print two dozen extra copies of each page, to compensate for wastage. Then it was three weeks, halfway through September. Soon it would be Michaelmas, and they had managed only six pages in a book that ran to nearly fourteen hundred. At this rate, Hans said, chewing at his lip, even if you rounded, it would take them seven years.

Fust’s face grew blotched, the master’s blacker. Like rabid dogs they watched the crew: the more they watched, the more the ink balls slipped and the paper missed. Peter felt for Ruppel and Keffer; he sensed their fear of slipping and the sickness in their guts. He and Hans were not exempt: woe betide the man who made a setting error, if the master found it printed there. “F!” he’d bawl, or “M!” and reach a lightning hand to pluck out the offending letter. Hans or Peter would step out with the replacement, flinching as the reject whistled past. Gutenberg made not the slightest effort to control his temper, flinging, shouting, cursing, punching at the air. Pustules, cretins, misbegotten blackguards, spawn of Satan—he dispensed them all. He’d left no margin for such errors, it appeared—and that, to Peter, was the greatest error of them all.

The book had been designed to save on paper. There were no blanks left for a lavish painting; every line was calculated closely, to squeeze the most from every paper bale. Those bales, of course, were paid for out of Fust’s new capital investment, which he had borrowed not just for supplies but for the workers’ pay and room and board. It took no special skill to note the waste sheets mounting and the corresponding tightness in the partners’ jaws. Vast sums were riding on it, every man among them knew; the master had spent frugally, but freely. No man alive had ever before ordered ten full bales of paper and five thousand calfskins at a single stroke, Peter was quite certain.

He used to wonder what those herdsmen and those paper makers thought. There must have been a glut of veal and calves’ legs up in Swabia, he reckoned. Never in their lives had shepherds seen such quantities, such promises of guilders. They had to wonder, and no doubt aloud—though Fust was satisfied, he said, by the discretion of the leader of the butchers’ guild. No stranger came to Mainz who was not welcomed in the tavern of some brotherhood, and quietly paid on Fust’s account, and told to keep his business to himself.

The ring that circled them was hard to see, but it was there. When the harvest started, they found jugs of the last pressing of the grapes upon the granite stoop. Round loaves of bread were left, and honey, bacon, in a basket someone set up by the alley door. It must have been the second week when Peter noticed that there were sprigs of mugwort tucked around the eaves, a wreath of rosemary hung on the portal to the yard. The men of Mainz kept their lips shut; the women hung their charms to ward off evils; the Lord up in His heaven watched.

A month went by before Fust grimly said they had to find a faster way. The master flapped his hand at Peter the next morning just as soon as he arrived. Gutenberg was seated at his stool, the desk before him littered with odd strips of print. He started speaking before Peter even came in earshot: “. . . win more lines.” He brandished a poor waste sheet. “Cram in more words.” Peter saw that he had pasted one more line beneath each crooked column. “Don’t wag your head at me.” The master’s eyebrows bristled. “Just shut your mouth and do it.”

Mutely Peter took the sheet. In the composing room he walked toward the granite stone on which the second page of Genesis lay waiting. They’d printed off the first real page of scripture just the day before. Fury shook his fingers as he opened up the twine and pulled the top line from the second column, moved it to the bottom of the first. Just yesterday he’d felt his heart sing as he set: he’d marveled as he etched Creation’s shape, and laughed to think he’d set a whale, but never seen one. And now this madman planned to mar this perfect symmetry. Jaw clenched, he set the next two lines to fill the foot of that right-hand column. He tied it, carried it to Keffer. “Blasphemy,” he muttered, neck hairs rising as the master dogged him close behind. “I never said that you would like it,” Gutenberg growled in response.

He kept on droning even after Peter had joined Hans at their composing stools. They’d save the price of one whole book, he said. If they didn’t learn by doing, cutting costs, they’d never even make it to the Psalms. Already they’d spent more than anyone had reckoned. Peter heard the worm turn in his ear:
We’ve got to beat this beast, or it will get the best of us.

No sooner had the press begun to punch those one-and-forty lines than Gutenberg was back, like a bad dream. His long nose poked in through the aperture that served as door. “We can get more. I’m sure of it. We can win more.”

Peter ground his teeth to keep himself from cursing him aloud. “You will destroy the page. Distort the golden mean.” He shook his head, past caring. “It will look cramped and cheap as any pocket Bible.” He threw his hand toward those close-jammed written sheets from which they set. The master turned and disappeared.

An hour later Wiegand summoned Peter. “Master says you have to come upstairs.”

Gutenberg and Fust were at the great oak table, standing and frowning down at two sheets laid out side by side. His father glanced at him, his arms held stiffly at his back. “You have refused, I hear,” he said, “to add another line.” His face was grave.

“It will distort it beyond measure.”

Gutenberg spread one stained hand across the text. “This shape is sacred, then, you say?” Peter curtly nodded. The master dropped his hand and stared off into space. “There has to be another way.”

He swept his dark eyes first toward Fust, then Peter. “Mechanics,” he enjoined his right-hand man. “Think on the mechanics. What other way is there, to gain more space upon the page?”

He spoke in singsong, like a Latin master. Peter frowned, and strained his inner eye. Blurrily at first, and then more firmly, he grasped his meaning.

“Take some away.”

The master waited.

“Take out some space,” said his apprentice. “Between the lines?”